Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

The new, well-deserved honor for John Boehner

Paul Krugman has come up with a reward for the Speaker of the House, a reward that fully reflects Boehner's nutty twists and turns in his relationship with the President. It looked, in the end, a little like a love affair gone bad with the rejected suitor going around making embarrassing little speeches and saying things like "I'll never speak to him again." Obama looked several inches taller at the end of it all.

Krugman discusses the creation and use of that $1 trillion-dollar platinum coin the President may mint and spend to save us from the crazed Republican actions to avoid paying their bills. Forget about the causes for a moment and focus on the coin itself. What would it really look like?

Enter the platinum coin. There’s a legal loophole
allowing the Treasury to mint platinum coins in any denomination the
secretary chooses. Yes, it was intended to allow commemorative
collector’s items — but that’s not what the letter of the law says. And
by minting a $1 trillion coin, then depositing it at the Fed, the
Treasury could acquire enough cash to sidestep the debt ceiling — while
doing no economic harm at all.

So why not?

It’s
easy to make sententious remarks to the effect that we shouldn’t look
for gimmicks, we should sit down like serious people and deal with our
problems realistically. That may sound reasonable — if you’ve been
living in a cave for the past four years.Given the realities of our
political situation, and in particular the mixture of ruthlessness and
craziness that now characterizes House Republicans, it’s just ridiculous
— far more ridiculous than the notion of the coin.

So if the 14th
amendment solution — simply declaring that the debt ceiling is
unconstitutional — isn’t workable, go with the coin.

This still
leaves the question of whose face goes on the coin — but that’s easy:
John Boehner. Because without him and his colleagues, this wouldn’t be
necessary. ...Krugman, Economics and Politics